1. Asia should enhance interconnection between the infrastructure projects above and new ones yet to be built.

2. Asia should ‘bundle’ new power line, natural gas and fiber optic infrastructures to create more flexible cross-border energy and information networks. Building this network would require annual investment ofroughly 1-2% of Asian GDP over 40 years.

The research in this report is been compiled from sources believed reliable. However, its accuracy is notand cannotbe assured.

Readers must judge the veracity of this report’s contents independently. Readers must do their own research before drawing any conclusions.

Grenatec does not guarantee the accuracy of anything in this report.

Grenatec is not liable to and does not indemnifyany party relying on the content of the report against any action, suit, claim, demand, loss, cost or expense whatsoever arising out of or referable to this document.

By downloading this report the recipient and any subsequent entites receiving this study from the above readers release Grenatec from liability of any kind arising from or referable to this report.

Nothing in this report constitutes investment advice.

Website links in this report are for information purposes only. Their inclusion does not constitute endorsement by Grenatec of the accuracy of the information in the link nor the organization that created the content.

The links are included exclusively to assist readers in doing their own research.

This work is copyright.

No part may be reproduced without prior written permission from Grenatec.

Foreward

A Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure is a big idea.

It’s also a sensible, timely one.

If the utility of Asia’s infrastructure is to be maximized, a Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure represents compelling value.

These Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure ideas are about the future. They’re about solving climate change. They’re about economic growth.

Most important, they’re about the art of the possible.

As a former economics and technology journalist, co-founder of the DESERTEC Foundation, founder of DESERTEC-Australia and now principal of Grenatec — I hope you’ll see — as I have — how the dots connect in Asia.

In coming years, ‘Asia’ (China, Japan, South Korea, the ASEAN states and Australia) will soon be the world’s largest regional economy.

The region has a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build for a low-emission regional energy future and prosper while doing so.

Stewart Taggart

Principal, Grenatec

Pan Asian Energy Infrastructure:
In Place By 2050?

Executive Summary

By 2050, Asia could be criss-crossed by a highly-efficient network of High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines, natural gas pipelines and fiber optic cables.

The impact would be revolutionary.

Across the flexible system would flow low-emission energy sources accompanied by the information to manage them.

Solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, wave and tidal power, natural gas and clean coal would compete for customers under common rules in a single market governed by carbon-adjustedpricing.

It would enable generation and distribution technologies to evolve (such as ‘load management’ and ‘transport or transmit’)as well as encourage development potential future fuel types (such as hydrogen and bio-fuels) through ensuring market access.

Between now and 2050 China, Japan, South Korea, the ASEAN states and Australia will be investing trillions of dollars to expand, replace and upgrade the region’s transport, telecommunications and energy infrastructure systems.

The above is not discretionary spending.

It’s essential investment.

Without this investment, Asia can’t improve living standards in the world’s most economically-dynamic region.

The good news is that ‘bits and pieces’ of a Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructureare already falling into place.

And that’s the purpose of this report: to raise awareness of the interlocking synergies the future could bring to Asia through a collectively-interconnected energy infrastructure.

These projects represent the first stage of a dramatic buildout of new energy generation and transmission capacity. They are happening in different ways in different places.

China is building out long-distance electricity transmission across its territory. Australia and Indonesia are building out fiber optic systems. Territorial tensions in the South China Sea and East China Sea could be solved through creating Joint Development Areas connected to common infrastructure.

What’s needed is to put all these ideas together, and create a bundled network in Asia that could last a century or more. It will prove cost-effective, highly efficient in curbing climate change and will contribute to regional peace.

Australia’s National Broadband Network will create a high-speed communications system across the world’s most isolated continent.

Indonesia’s Palapa Ring fiber optic project will provide the country’s scattered eastern archipelago with advanced telecommunications for the first time.

China’s plans for a unified domestic electricity grid by 2020. This will speed China’s emergence as a major industrial power. Meanwhile, China is wiring its major cities with fiber optic cables under the China Fiber Optic City program.

Linking these projects together and expanding them will create a mid-21st Century low-emission regional energy network governed by open-access, competition and innovation.

The task now is to grasp the potential.

In this report, Grenatec analyzes the potential for an integrated energy and telecommunications infrastructure in Asia.

Grenatec then proposes infrastructure topologies stretching from Siberia to the Southern Ocean.

Existing and future energy infrastructure in Asia should be made ‘interconnection-ready.’

This shouldn’t be hard. Common standards are widespread.

2. Introduce carbon pricing.

The lack of carbon-adjusted pricing gives an uneconomic advantage to coal.

This market failure has created climate change, the most expensive inter-generational subsidy in human history.

Trillions of dollars of global warming’s accumulated financial liabilities are now being shifted onto the unborn without their informed consent. Intergenerational-equity mandates equitable sharing of these liabilities.

If Asia plans ahead and coordinates, these costs (as well as the costs of climate change) can be much reduced.This can be achieved through application of orthodox market economics based upon full-cost accounting.

4. Develop ‘Cloud Energy’

In the past 20 years, packet-switching has replaced circuit-switching as the main mode of global telecommunications.

Figuratively-speaking, the same thing now needs to happen with energy.

That’s because megawatt-hours and megajoules are just packets of energy. They’re well suited to aggregated, multi-path delivery.

In energy, as in data, this can be achieved through creation of an efficient, multilateral infrastructure governed by open access and common standards.

In the past 20 years, fiber optics and the Internet Protocol has enabled ‘cloud computing.’

In the next 20 years, high-voltage direct current power lines and ubiquitously-interconnected markets can enable ‘cloud energy.’